63 Maximizing Sales Potential and Brand Awareness - Mike Begg Mar 14 2024

Erik Martinez: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today, Tim and I have Mike Begg on the show to discuss selling on Amazon, scaling your business, and entrepreneurship. Mike is a co-founder and the CEO at AMZ Advisors, a leading digital marketing and E-commerce consulting firm that helps brands maximize their potential on platforms like Amazon.

Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Begg: Erik, thank you for having me here. Excited to be here chatting with you guys today.

Erik Martinez: We were just talking about kind of the fun place you get to live. I'm very jealous of [00:01:00] you living in a nice, warm, stable climate right now. We may have to dive into that topic a little bit later, but before we jump into our main topics today, could you give us just a brief overview of your journey to this point?

Mike Begg: Of course, it's been an interesting journey, to say the least. So, I'm originally from Connecticut, grew up there pretty much my entire life. Went to a university in Long Island for one year. Didn't like it. Transferred to a school in Philadelphia and finished a university there.

After I graduated, I went into working in consulting at Deloitte. Deloitte was an interesting experience. It gave me a lot of insight into what I liked and what I didn't like. I realized that working at Deloitte was one of the things that I didn't like and I liked working on real estate projects.

So, from there, I went into a job working at Sears. I initially joined helping them create a real estate investment trust. We spun that off and then I stayed on doing real estate development projects. While I was working there was while Sears was struggling or starting to struggle [00:02:00] and also while E-commerce was starting to take off.

And it kind of was a unique time to be there because I was seeing it from two different angles. Obviously, sitting in the retail side, the retail business, part of my job was closing stores and then redeveloping them into other uses, and at the same time I was selling assets. One of the assets I was selling was a property in a mall. It was essentially closed. Two of the bidders for the property were FedEx and the other one was Amazon. And I was like, well, Amazon's an online store. Why are they buying a mall? That doesn't make any sense.

And, you know, start digging into it. From there, I figured out they're building their own fulfillment network. They have all these warehouses everywhere. What they were doing was converting the mall into a warehouse. And that's where I started learning more and more about E-commerce. I figured out that I could sell books online and then I figured out that I could resell other people's products. So, I could go to Walmart and Target and buy products there and sell them online.

And then finally, I figured out that I could create my own brand by importing products from China. Did that. Built a couple of different brands, ended up selling them off. And then I started the agency with the two partners I have [00:03:00] today. And since then, you know, we've opened up a variety of other different businesses within the E-commerce and online business space.

Erik Martinez: That's a pretty wild journey. I mean, you've covered retail, you've covered real estate, you've covered E-commerce and direct-to-consumer in some interesting capacities. So, just out of curiosity, how does that inform today, your view of E-commerce and particularly the opportunities and strategies that you use on Amazon?

Mike Begg: Yeah. So, I think all of this journey has given me different approaches and different views on things. Obviously, E-commerce is continuing to grow, but as a percentage of retail sales in the US, it's still a relatively low number. It's only about, I think, 15, 16 percent right now, which means there's still a ton of sales that are happening in stores, that are happening in physical retail. So, E-commerce is still kind of at the early stages. So, there's going to be more and more opportunities to [00:04:00] continue to sell products online.

And I think we're seeing that in other platforms that are starting to come online, like TikTok shops, like Instagram stores, like all of the online shopping opportunities we have now that social media platforms are starting to add on. So, there's gonna be more and more ways for people to start purchasing products online in the future.

Amazon, in a way, is becoming more of a mature E-commerce platform because initially, it was easy for sellers to get in there. It was easy for sellers like myself to launch products. Now it's getting more and more difficult. You have to find more and more niches where you can launch products if you're building brands yourself.

For example, when I started selling my first brand, it was an art supply brand. The large art supply brand out there is Crayola. We were competing against Crayola back then, and we were beating Crayola in the categories we were selling in. We weren't selling crayons. I'll say that much. But in markers and other categories, we were beating Crayola out on sales. And we were like, Oh, that's interesting. Like, these brands don't [00:05:00] know what they're doing.

That doesn't exist anymore. All of those brands have caught on and they've started pouring more and more advertising dollars into the platform. So, when it comes to the ability of brands, or like disruptor brands, we'll call them, of launching and stealing market share, it's becoming harder and harder, and that's why I kind of say Amazon's becoming more of a mature platform in comparison to other platforms that are just launching or just coming online.

Erik Martinez: You know, it's interesting that you say that because we've been having this conversation. We don't do Amazon work, right? We do paid search work and the number one encroacher is Amazon. I can tell you that with all the changes that Google's made in the way you utilize their tools and the fact that Amazon really, really drives its merchants to continue optimizing their stores, it used to be easy for us to take this strategy of get everybody's products.

So, if you had a catalog of two or [00:06:00] 3,000 items or more, you could put every single one of those products out on Google. You could advertise them, you could drive sales to almost every single one of those products. Not every product sells, of course, but we took the spread strategy, and because of what you just said, Amazon getting so much more mature and the brands being a lot smarter about their optimization, it's harder and harder for us to use that strategy.

And we've been talking about how do we offset that. What can't Amazon do in today's environment that we can do small niche specialty retail brands to compete? And I think hit the nail on the head, Amazon is a maturing platform and the optimization level and knowledge within the brands of how to do it is much, much higher. But you know what? We're also seeing that on their websites. They're getting better in optimizing outside of the Amazon platform as well. So, I think that's a really, really good [00:07:00] point.

Mike Begg: And I think that's kind of the development of E-commerce in general. I mean, sellers are getting smarter and smarter on how things work. So, like for us, when we look at Amazon, just cause this is our world, we look at the rising cost of advertising, the rising cost of CPCs. Conversion rates are relatively stable, but like it's getting more and more expensive, plus Amazon's figuring out ways to charge more and more fees to offset their costs.

So, we have to look more frequently into other ways that we can drive traffic to Amazon that's going to be lower cost, or that's going to give us a lower cost per client acquisition cost. It forces us to think kind of ahead of the curve too, and that's the type of conversation you always need to have. It's like, all right, this is what I'm seeing, now how do I adapt to this? It's cool. It's cool to be in that space kind of right now, but it's definitely getting more and more challenging.

Tim Curtis: That's what I wondered. When you're talking about Amazon and the maturation of the platform, it's not this wide open wild, wild west. People have caught on to how to optimize Amazon. The advertising has stabilized, continues to grow, but it really has stabilized. You're seeing that, as you mentioned, the continued increase in the cost per [00:08:00] click. I think universally, we're still seeing flashes of inflationary pricing when you get outside of Amazon on the advertising, but those are the kinds of things that we're watching.

So, now that we're pivoting into Amazon as a mature platform, you're looking at E-commerce as not mature, but stable, but continue to see a lot of opportunity in the future for growth on the E-commerce side. So, kind of doing a parallel path here, let's take a look at five to 10 years and would be curious as to your opinion on five to 10 years on Amazon, what you think that's going to play out, how that's going to look, and then five to 10 years on E-commerce? Share with us your vision for what you're seeing in both of those respective places.

Mike Begg: Well, I think in a way they're both moving to one similar goal. I mean, a lot of people will call it omni channel. Typically, that considers retail as well. Most brands online are not considering retail, but for lack of a better term, let's call it omni channel E-commerce. They're both moving in that direction, and that's how does Amazon tie in with my [00:09:00] website, how does it tie in with my other platforms where other people are finding me?

That's one of the things that we're already seeing on Amazon itself, on how they're trying to adapt for it. So, they've launched Amazon Posts, which is their attempt at like a social media feature within Amazon. They've launched Amazon Live, Amazon Influencer, all of these different ways for brands to try to connect in other sales techniques that you would see off of Amazon, so other E-commerce channels. That's the direction it's continuing to move into.

So, I think five, 10 years from now, social selling is probably going to become more and more important on Amazon. What that looks like, I don't know, but I do know that Amazon has all of the consumer data of everything that people have been purchasing. They're going to be able to leverage that data in some way to add some additional aspect of social selling that's going to become popular. What that is, I don't know.

When it comes to E-commerce as a whole, and this is kind of where I talked about everything tying in together, it's not going to be anymore, how do I compete against Amazon, it's how do I leverage Amazon to help all my other sales channels? And that's [00:10:00] going to be a big puzzle for a lot of people to figure out, and it's something we're already trying to solve.

And the way that we kind of look at this now and how we kind of see it moving forward in the future is that each business has its sales funnel. It has the top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Amazon itself has its own sales funnel, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. When we look at how Amazon fits within the E-commerce ecosystem, it is a top of funnel platform.

Customers are going to Amazon. I think the number now is like 70 percent of all product searches start on Amazon. Customers are going there to find products. And then from there, they might go to other platforms to look for them. Or they might purchase the product on Amazon, and that's a way for you to try to reach out to them or engage with them in some other way.

So, when customers are going there and that becomes your main customer acquisition channel, the challenge now becomes if I'm acquiring customers here, how do I get these customers to other platforms where I can then leverage them through email marketing or paid ad retargeting or social media, whatever it may be. That's one of the challenges that most brands are going to have to figure out over the next five to 10 years on the E- [00:11:00] commerce side is how does all of this ties together.

Tim Curtis: I think of the Amazon and Shopify partnership. That's one of those things that I think when that was announced, it sort of put you in a place where you really had to kind of stop and think about the ramifications of that. Does that foretell others doing something similar? And then all of a sudden now you're talking about a really connected network of marketplaces and direct-to-consumer and those lines begin to blur.

I see the marketplaces, Amazon, of course, leading the marketplaces and I see the E-commerce and I'm wondering, are we beginning to see the connection between them and what's that mean five to 10 years, or how are we going to manage that? Of course, we don't know. Right? We really don't know what it's going to look like, but I think we're beginning to get a glimpse of directionally where it's headed.

Mike Begg: And I would agree on that. I think the one example of that not holding true right now is TikTok. TikTok seems like they want to go head to head with Amazon and actually really battle them there, and I don't know what that's going to look like in the long run. I mean, I think every other platform is kind of getting to that point where [00:12:00] things more easily integrate or there's more connection between them.

But TikTok seems to be going the other way and saying like, no, we want our users on the platform staying here. We don't want to push traffic anywhere else, like make the purchase happen here. So, it's gonna be interesting to see how that platform evolves because it is extremely popular right now, especially with younger generations.

We even see it now when clients run ads on TikTok, or they're promoting their product even for TikTok shops, there is spillover traffic of people coming to Amazon searching for the product. So, there's a connection, but there's no real direct integration. Plus there's also the aspect of them trying to compete directly with Amazon. So, that's going to be the one area where I think it's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out.

Erik Martinez: I'm kind of curious, listening to this conversation because I have a client who was an early adopter of Amazon. It's a big piece of their business. They're actually in something like 16 marketplaces, which have its own unique set of complexities, plus the own brand site. What we have [00:13:00] seen with them post-pandemic is for a brief period of time during the pandemic, Amazon kind of stopped all their advertising and took a pause because they're just getting inundated with business, right? Because everybody was home and shopping and all that good stuff.

And then it took about a year before they kind of started turning on the marketing engine and they've been really aggressive since then. So, we see a lot of encroachment on the brand side from Amazon. And it's not just Amazon, it's Wayfair. It's all the other big marketplaces, Walmart, et cetera. So, here's the question, from a merchandising standpoint, does it make sense for these brands to take an approach of, Hey, I've got this catalog of back kind of where we started 3, 000 items, do I put all 3, 000 items on every platform or do I now start slicing and dicing my offering to fit to the [00:14:00] unique niches within each of those platforms? And then what do I do with my own brand site?

Because I think one of the struggles that we're seeing with this particular client is we're doing all this advertising, Google being the biggest, but Facebook Meta, you know, some of these other platforms, and we're doing all this advertising on Amazon, and these two things are coming to loggerheads where we're now like, are we overspending on our advertising to acquire these customers? Should we change that strategy?

This just happens to be one use case, but I think what you just described as a potential future is really where we're headed. This question becomes a bigger question. Is it incumbent on a brand to still maintain their own brand presence solo outside the marketplaces? It's just one of those questions.

Mike Begg: That's one of the challenges with Amazon has really been around pricing control and that's where a lot of the issues come [00:15:00] up between your own website between Walmart between all these other channels. So, in that instance, where you have a large catalog, you may want to focus only on your top sellers and the niches on Amazon and really push those with the advertising because that's what's going to bring people in.

And now, when I have other offers that are related or even potentially better, running them through your website where you control pricing, where you can drop pricing, where you can kind of compete outside of the restrictions that Amazon puts on it when you have the products on both platforms. So, that's where a lot of that conflict comes into play and where it gets really challenging.

Now, the same problem comes up, how do I create this awareness for my other products that are on my website if they're not on Amazon and they're not found? That's the big challenge. So, the way that we can see it done is using things like product insert cards or some type of gift or something.

Like, a good example of this would be if you offer an ebook or a warranty or something, something where they need to come to your website to actually claim it, that is a way to start getting their attention to the website. And then from there, you can run [00:16:00] retargeting ads, you can feature other products in front of them or something that might be complimentary to their product. That's another good example of a way to do it. You have a product on Amazon that requires a refill or something that's only available through your website. Push them from there over to there, push them from Amazon over to your website. So, there's different ways to go about it.

You bring up a really good point in that when it comes to ad dollars, getting the most return on your ad dollars, you can't spend money across everything, across every platform, across every product. Generally, what we find is like Pareto's Law exists pretty much everywhere in the world. So, why not spend money on your top products on Amazon, acquire the customers there, and then figure out a way to bring them over to your website where you have the opportunity to upsell them on something else, cross-sell them onto another product, or just get them into your marketing funnel there through retargeting ads, through email, through whatever it may be.

Erik Martinez: Mike, I'm gonna just snip that whole segment of the conversation. I'm going to hand that off to my team and to every one of my clients because we've been saying stuff like that to them. It's hard because the systems. There is [00:17:00] a systems challenge and all of this behind the scenes, how do I manage all this product data, how do I manage every single feed going into every single platform, not to mention the customer service side of dealing with all of that.

So, we don't need to dive into that any further, but I really appreciate your thoughts on that because it is a conversation that we're having very regularly with existing clients. And it's a real challenge for them to just think, not only about their primary channel, whether that primary channel is Amazon or their website, but then thinking about that secondary channel. And then you start adding extra platforms on top of it, everybody's head starts to explode.

So, let's pivot a little bit to in this crazy environment that you just described and this crazy future, which is it's actually kind of fun, right? It's like, it's still the new frontier. It's just a different aspect of the new frontier. What are the strategies that you think [00:18:00] are best for scaling a business in this type of environment?

I mean, we just talked about like some tactical things that you might be able to do to help with that, but what are the big strategies that will help you scale your business? You know, if you're a 1 million dollar business right now and you want to become a 10 million dollar business, how do we go about doing that?

Mike Begg: So, that's a very good point. And it kind of goes back to the whole funnel aspect that we were talking about a little bit earlier. As I said, within Amazon, there exists a sales funnel, there's bottom of the funnel, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel. Bottom of the funnel, people are already coming to Amazon. They're searching for, I don't know, a coffee mug. I have one in front of me. Coffee mug, they want to buy a coffee mug. Great. They see a coffee mug they like, they buy it.

They're not searching for a brand. They're not searching for a Yeti coffee mug or whatever. they're just looking for something in general. Those are the people that are at bottom of the funnel, low-hanging fruit. You can convert them easily. And when we talk about conversion rates actually, what you see on Amazon, the typical [00:19:00] conversion rate is about 8%, which is pretty high compared to what you see on Shopify or Big Commerce or any other website or even other platforms. People trust Amazon. That's why so many people buy there.

So, when we talk about how do we navigate this, we always start with bottom of the funnel. How do we get in front of as many customers that are ready to buy now, and then from there, we start building up? From our side, we are very much a performance marketing agency and we deal with this, all the challenges, all the problems that come with it is that when clients aren't happy with the performance, they complain. So, we have to be really specific on the way that we drive sales through the ad budget that we're actually spending, how we drive that revenue for them.

Where we frequently struggle to get the idea across to clients is that you need to invest in top of funnel. You need to invest in video ads, in brand awareness ads. They don't see the immediate return on that. It also has a negative effect on us because they're not going to see that immediate return in the near future. It's going to come down the line, and they're going to see money going out and they're not going to see money coming in.

[00:20:00] So, it's one of the areas where we kind of struggle as an agency and in the performance marketing space, in general, is like, how do we help clients understand this and invest for the long term? One of the ways that we've kind of been addressing this challenge has been focusing a lot more on, we call it PR and affiliate. How do we get our brand out there onto different blogs, onto different product review sites, onto different videos on YouTube, whatever it may be? Even videos on social media, how do we get onto content like that? And focusing a lot more on that is ways for us to build the brand awareness by providing affiliate commissions instead of having to pay advertising dollars.

So, we're able to tie the brand awareness much more easily back to the performance aspect. Well, we're going to pay out a 20 percent commission every time we sell a product, let's say, or 15 percent commission, whatever it may be. Now the client sees, all right, I'm paying out 15 bucks, but I drove a sale. So, that's how we kind of have to tie it together as a performance agency is when we're trying to create the awareness, we're trying to drive more sales for it. We're trying to [00:21:00] get your brand out there.

We're going to do this type of placement where people are searching on Google and your products just randomly showing up or social media, and it's showing up, and then people are coming to Amazon and purchasing that way. That's how we kind of tie together. And I think that's a lot easier for brands to really digest than, even going back just a few years, Hey, I'm going to spend a couple million dollars on an ad on TV. And I don't know what that's going to bring in.

I put an ad on radio. I had a client tell me they run ads on radio the other day. And I was like, wow, that's impressive. Like, I didn't even know that was still a thing. It's just throwing money out there that you don't really know is coming back. And I think that's where things are getting more challenging as the cost goes up, as advertising gets more expensive, as acquiring customers gets more expensive is that they want to know that they're going to get a returning on the money they're putting out there. And that's why we've kind of shifted our brand awareness strategy to be a much more tied to performance than anything.

Erik Martinez: I think that's really smart. And you're right, that top of funnel piece is the hardest piece because there is no attribution model in the [00:22:00] world, Tim and I just had a conversation with a gentleman from MMA Global, and they study this stuff and he even said, there is no attribution model in the world that can predict all the outcomes.

So, you kind of have to pick a path and stick with it and understand that this is the path, this is the way I'm going about it, set up some experiments to see, dial it up and back to make sure that it works or doesn't work, and follow it through. One of the challenges that we see, and Tim, you sit in a few more boardrooms than I do, there's a patience factor in this that has to come into play right?

Because I think our society is so immediate gratification. Building the pillars, building the foundation, and then putting the structure in, takes time, and it can't be done overnight. It has to be done over time because none of us have that kind of money. Well, maybe Amazon does, but we don't have the kind of money. And most of our brands don't have the kind of money to [00:23:00] pursue these big initiatives and have them done in a quarter. Or am I wrong? I mean, I could be wrong.

Mike Begg: No, I think you're right. But Tim, yeah. Do you agree on that?

Tim Curtis: I do. I, uh, think one of the things that we've seen in the last 10 to 12 years is what I'm gonna call a bifurcation. So, the bifurcation is you have a lot of what we would say are the traditional legacy companies, the brands that are out there that have been selling for years. You know, some of them are big box, some of them are not. They're just traditional online brands. Some have store presence.

And then you have this entire category that really is coming from the venture capital community. Those are by and large are launching with an awareness for brand. It's really interesting. They're investing in the brand in an attempt to establish the brand with a bit more awareness, positioning it a little higher, if you will, in terms of representation to command, maybe a little bit more of a premium product.

So, what you see is again is bifurcation. The brands that are doing that, [00:24:00] that have an awareness of the importance of brand, which is that intangible, you're spending money on building something up. They also have the stomach and have the institutional knowledge to know we've got to build the awareness.

You flip that to the traditional legacy and what they're doing is they're looking for the immediate gratification of a sale right away. They're sort of cannibalizing tomorrow by doing it today. They've turned email into a liquidation channel. So, it really has had channel impact. When companies get into those, that tends to be a bit of a death spiral. It's not sustainable. You've got to really figure out a strategy.

You mentioned Yeti. So, Yeti has been a client for years. There's many products that are very similar to Yeti, but there's really only one Yeti. When a product comes out and people are wanting to grab a hold of it, Yeti wins. They can command a premium product. People want to be seen with the brand.

You had this little flash of Stanley here, and pastel colors and you know everything that's happened there. But those are really the kind of things that I think [00:25:00] if brands are going to be built for long-term success, if they're in it for the long play, then they'll have to pivot and go into that awareness and brand building because that's where it's going to pay off the in future.

Mike Begg: 100%. That's where the long-term return for brands are too, and especially on Amazon. Like, I can compete on coffee mugs, but there are 5,000 other sellers selling coffee mugs and it's a generic branded term, and the cost of that is going to keep going up over time as more and more sellers start trying to sell coffee mugs. Versus if I have someone coming to Amazon searching for Yeti, the cost of that acquisition is going to be much lower, even if I'm running paid ads.

Like, on a defensive standpoint, to prevent brand leakage, the cost of acquiring that sale is going to be much lower than a sale on coffee mug over time. So, that's where the value of the brand return comes into place. And even kind of on the brand awareness strategy that I was just briefly touching on. Yeah, there's a big-time lead there. I mean, we have to bring a brand on. Then we have to start contacting all of these [00:26:00] affiliate platforms, all these publications, all these influencers, start getting them on board with the commissions or an affiliate structure versus like a paid UGC engagement. And all of that takes time.

So, we don't start seeing a sales lift to maybe four or five months down the road, and that's where we really start seeing the benefit. And yeah, a lot of brands don't have patience for that. It's, you know, I need money now, I need to spend more ad dollars. I need to get it out there. I need to see the dollars coming in. And that does fall into a trap of where you're not really thinking of the long term.

Tim Curtis: It's the tyranny of the urgent in many of those cases because they're not hitting the sales numbers, you know, the shareholders are upset or, you know, whatever it is. Again, it goes back to that tyranny of the urgent. And that's where you just really begin to see these challenger brands rising up that can do all the right things and they're just they're feasting on these legacy brands because the legacy brands can't get out of their own way.

Mike Begg: And the other thing to consider is that you're playing by the platforms that you're advertising on. What was it 2 years ago [00:27:00] when Facebook changed up all their ads or Meta, whatever it's called now? Everyone's ad performance dropped off and if you were relying on the Facebook channel for your ad sales for your brand, you pretty much lost your sales channel. If you're overly reliant on the direct sales approach, I'm going to run an ad, I'm going to get a sale from this ad and that's how I make all my revenue, you're going to completely be victim to changes in algorithms, changes in even legal requirements, that might come up down the road. That's a huge risk for most businesses.

Tim Curtis: You think about direct-to-consumer businesses and E-commerce, it's not at all dissimilar from the tension between your paid media and your SEO. Brands really investing in the paid media because they need that immediacy of the sale and they're not investing in the long-term SEO value, which is going to bring the higher, better quality leads in, more organic, better lifetime value, et cetera. So, it's not dissimilar.

So, talking about these brands, what do you see, specifically in the digital marketing side, as the future type of innovation? We're sitting here, we're watching the entire [00:28:00] maturation of digital marketing. Period. Soup to nuts. We're watching CPCs and I don't care what headlines say today, CPCs on average are rising. The conversion rates are not rising. At best, they're holding steady. At worst, they're dropping.

Knowing what we know about the impact of the privacy laws and how that has really effectively neutered a lot of the targeting capabilities, what do you see as the next element of innovation that's going to sweep through that E-commerce or direct-to-consumer side?

Mike Begg: It's tough to say for sure. I mean, I think it all relates back to the content you're producing. Whether that content's for SEO purposes, whether it's video content, whether it's social media content, you have to be able to capture attention in some way that is not going to be a paid ad, that's not going to be dollars going out. I mean, you're putting money into producing great content, obviously, that's the trade-off, but the benefit is that it's going to start capturing more eyes over time, and it's going to hopefully help you build 1P cookies, getting more people through your site, giving you more opportunities for [00:29:00] retargeting.

We're already seeing that in other forums like live shopping. That's becoming more and more popular on Amazon. It's massively popular in Eastern Asia. It's all going to come down to content and most companies are not set up to be content machines. I still think this is a big challenge for most brands because. how much content can Yeti put out that's really going to drive that much value and going to capture that much attention?

I don't know, but that is going to be the only way you're going to be able to do it. It's like, how do you have people find you and creating something that really stands out? We're already seeing it on Amazon, and I'm sure it's going to continue to happen on other platforms. There's just so much ad supply and so much ad saturation that you have to break through that and figure out a whole new way. And the only way I really see that in the digital space is through content.

Tim Curtis: it's really challenging brands to think about content for products or services that may seem mundane or common and thinking about ways to create content that makes them relevant, makes them a part of a conversation. It's really an interesting proposition [00:30:00] to think like that because you have to dig deeper. You really have to lean into your creatives and coming up with the storytelling and the Meta narrative of the brand and on all of those. And so we're right back into the middle of the importance of brand and branding and carrying that through.

So, I kind of wondered if in the future, we're really going to be just focused on the content and then whatever platform is at that moment in time, now we're in the TikTok world. We're in a place where TikTok is hot. Five years from now, who knows what's going to be hot? As long as you're focusing on that content, then you'll be able to pivot it to whatever distribution channel is hot for the time.

Mike Begg: Yeah, and that all comes down to agility, moving, making decisions quickly, testing new things quickly, seeing what's working, what's not working. Unfortunately, that's where most traditional retail brands really struggle is being agile. I mean, we see that all the time.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and back to patience, right? Because those things take time, and do the testing and see the results and then make those results [00:31:00] actionable. Right? So, let's pivot off of that conversation, and spin into the world of entrepreneurship. To a certain extent, I feel like one of the amazing things that Amazon has brought to our economy is the spirit of entrepreneurship.

Like you said, Hey, I realized I can sell books and then I can sell this. Right. And all of a sudden I can build a brand and source my products in Asia and bring those in. There's lots of success stories of small, medium sized brands, brands that a lot of people haven't even heard of today. So, as we move to this future where we're seeing maybe a little more interconnectedness between the platforms, the brand itself, the brand site and other platforms, where do you think entrepreneurs should focus their efforts, or what advice would you give them in this environment and say, Hey, if you're starting a business [00:32:00] or thinking about starting a business today, this is the way to go?

Mike Begg: Okay. That's a very difficult question to unpack. There's so many different things happening. I think you hear about a 15-year-old making 10 million dollars a year on TikTok shops, like every other week now. There's people that are figuring out ways to game the system. They are capturing attention. I mean, that's what it is. It comes back to content. It comes back to attention. So, and I think this holds true in any business. Whether it's service, whether it's a product, whether it's even a digital product, you need to be able to capture attention.

Myself, I run a B2B business. As a B2B business, we focus a lot on content marketing. What I'm doing right now is content marketing. Webinars are content marketing. SEO is content marketing. The type of content where your customers are going to be searching is the type of content that you need to produce. If you're a brand, if you're going to launch a brand, figure out where are the marketing channels that I can reach the consumers that are going to purchase these products. What are the type of content that they're going to be seeing?

]So, I think we're getting to a point where if you want to be an entrepreneur, you almost need to kind of reverse engineer your [00:33:00] process and say, where am I just going to find the eyeballs that want to purchase what I have? And it might be social media. It might be email marketing. It might be, standing on the corner selling lemonade somewhere, like whatever it may be, there's different ways to capture attention.

I forgot who said this, but I heard some quote like the other day. It was like, where's the best place to put, your hot dog stand? Well, it's on the corner where everyone's hungry. You need to figure out where the people are and then you need to put out the content there to reach those people in whatever form, whatever way they want it. So I think that's what entrepreneurship is moving more and more towards.

There's the ability to be the solo entrepreneur or to have a small team in the background and you just kind of be the face. Because at the end of the day, people also buy from people. They're not really buying from, well, they do, but they're not buying from Johnson and Johnson. They want to buy from Mike Begg who has this crazy story or whatever it is or captures attention. So, I think entrepreneurship is moving more and more that way. You need to be able to have a way to capture attention, the content to put it out there, and know where the people that are going to purchase your product are.

Erik Martinez: [00:34:00] What I just heard you say is audience, audience, audience, audience, audience, audience. Start with your audience, right? Whether you've got the greatest merchandise idea ever, right? You still got to figure out who's going to buy that, where they're at. That's a really good piece of advice for people.

Mike Begg: It kind of goes back, there was another book I was reading recently, the author's name is David Kidder, kind of talking through the difference between, I think he calls it total adjustable market and total serviceable market. Really diving in and figuring out almost from a non-scalable standpoint of like, talk to your consumers, follow them around, see what they're doing, how they're using something versus how they're not using something, what features they take advantage of, what features they don't use. You really need to get down into like the nitty gritty and just see what consumers want.

Again, it comes to audience. If you have the focused audience, if you're going too broad, you're going to miss with whatever you're putting out. You really need to focus on who you're trying to get to, really understanding what their challenges and what their needs are, and then figuring out how to serve them in a better [00:35:00] way.

Tim Curtis: I love it. As we wrap up here, Mike, if someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that?

Mike Begg: Sure. So, the best way to get in touch with me is at my email, mike@amzadvisers.com. You can also check us out at our website, amzadvisers.com. And yeah, I'm always glad to chat about E-commerce, chat about marketing, entrepreneurship, whatever it may be. So, feel free to reach out anytime.

Tim Curtis: Great. Good conversation. A lot of fascinating stuff. You're a fascinating individual. I love your story and love the insights and what we were able to share today. It was a very free-flowing, easy conversation. So, I appreciate you coming on the show. That's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm your host Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

Erik Martinez: I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: Thanks. Have a great day. [00:36:00]